Laura Nyro; image courtesy of worldofkane.blogspot.com
The late Laura Nyro, the lady for whom I devote today’s post was a real voice for women coming of age in the latter half of the 1960s, performing at such hallowed, storied festivals as the Monterrey Pop Festival. Many of her peers admired her clear voice and challenging bric-a-brac jazzy pop compositions, some of which were covered by people like The 5th Dimension. Joni Mitchell considered her one of her few female musical contemporaries. Steves as diverse as The Blues Project’s Steve Katz to composer Stephen Sondheim loved “Stoned Soul Picnic,” the former of whom argued that it should be America’s national anthem. Move over, Francis Scott Key!
Yet how come I’ve only listened to her recently, after years of only hearing her name? How come my partner, whose parents were totally of the love generation (while my mother was not), had never even heard of her? Maybe you haven’t either.
In Sheila Weller’s book Girls Like Us, the author supposes that the reasons for Nyro’s obscurity are two-fold: 1. Her music was too complicated. 2. She wasn’t pretty.
As I know Weller is critical of these reasons, please read my next sentence as being removed from being critical toward the author. These reasons are total bullshit. Her music was too complicated? I find that hard to believe — I mean, were they more complicated than Joni Mitchell’s? If Nyro had gotten started around the time of, say, a Patti Smith or a Kate Bush, I don’t think this would have been an issue for her. Because of a Laura Nyro, someone like Joanna Newsom can wield a harp for long stretches while singing abstract narratives in a voice that recalls Lisa Simpson.
By the way, while Newsom is admittedly a rad harp player, I’ve warmed from “the emperor is naked” to “yeah, fine.” Ys was good. That said, I can do a pretty mean impression of her, and will launch into it with a gentle nudge.
The second reason, while more logical in terms of how mass culture is filtered through and framed by patriarchy, makes more sense. Nyro wasn’t pretty. What is really meant by this statement is that Nyro was normal looking, with an in-between body type. She wasn’t stick-thin and built for the mini-dresses and tight jeans created with a Joni Mitchell or a Michelle Phillips in mind. She also wasn’t fat like Cass Elliot, who was often cast as the earth mother before her death (when she has since become, by turns, a tragedy or a punch line).
But Nyro wasn’t pretty? Bullshit. Just watch her sing. Hear and watch. It’s amazing what doing an activity that clearly enlivens and excites you will do to your face, especially when the activity is as of-the-body as singing. For this exercise I elect the song I’d like to consider for our national anthem, “Save the Country.” Enjoy.
Cover of Exile in Guyville, released on Matador in 1993; image taken from The Village Voice
I’ve never been as excited and nervous about purchasing an album as I was with Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville. Of all the albums I’ve ever bought, I think I know more about it than anything. I studied the thing for nearly seven years before I bought it.
So, I was almost 10 when this album came out in 1993 and, if you know anything about it, you know it’s laden with immodest lyrics like “I’m a real cunt in spring,” “He’s got a really big tongue that rolls way out,” and, well, all of “Flower.” As an avid Rolling Stone reader, I was well-versed in this aspect of the album, because it seemed like this, along with it supposedly being an answer record to the Rolling Stones’ gritty masterpiece Exile on Main St., was of the utmost importance to male rock journalists.
Anyway, I was way nervous about getting this album and, ever the arbiter of self-control, I’d keep myself from using allowance and later paycheck money to buy it. I’d mentally smack my hand and say “Not now. You’re not ready.” If my mom knew I invested so much mental energy worrying about the explicit content of an album, she probably would have just bought the thing for me.
I finally bought Phair’s debut album on my seventeenth birthday. My friends Amy and Ryan pooled together $30 for me and I went to Barnes and Noble, determined to buy this taboo item. I took a deep breath, strolled to the music section, blithely snatched the album (along with GusGus’s This Is Normal), paid for my purchase, and ran out of the store in a flush. I went home, turned my stereo to the lowest audible volume and listened to the entire album lying on the floor, inches away from the speakers. The experience had a wrapt solemnity that others might have given the loss of their virginity. I was not the same after listening to it.
If I spent this much time mentally preparing for how my life would never be the same after hearing the album, I spent the next two years listening to it every day, learning every word, memorizing the instrumental tracks, tuning my ear to the watery guitar melodies, and poring over the Clint Eastwood/porn star sleeve art.
Sleeve art for Exile In Guyville, Part I
Sleeve art for Exile In Guyville, Part II
And I wasn’t alone in my investment in this album. I remember sharing this album with my then-boyfriend Kyle. As choir nerds, we particularly loved that the song “Flower” was a) super-dirty and b) a madrigal!
The first thing I’ll tell you that I loved about it was Phair’s voice. What Rob Sheffield referred to as “Peppermint Patty on a bad caffiene jag” in the Spin Alternative Record Guide is a pretty good description. Her voice was dry, low, and raspy. She had a perfectly average voice. It wasn’t a scream, like Courtney Love’s. It was unimpressed, garbled when she hit low notes, strained at the high notes, beyond deadpan. I’d later find out that she was inspired by lo-fi acts like The Spinanes and Tall Dwarfs (and maybe, perhaps on an unconscious level, Anna Da Silva and Gina Birch of The Raincoats or Moe Tucker from The Velvet Underground). At the time, though, it sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard. It sounded like she was right in the room with me.
Her voice was very relateable, seemingly the voice of someone who had done everything right up until the point of recording and was just really tired of being the smart, good girl. One need only listen to “Canary,” a song set to “Chopsticks” about a girl who obeys all the rules, gains nothing from it, and is ready to set everything on fire because of it. At seventeen, I could totally relate.
Phair’s singing style juxtaposed nicely with her look. Now, I’m not gonna slobber all over her the way that some rock journalists at the time. Yes, she’s attractive. But, more importantly, she looked very straight-A student white girl next door — perhaps what girl studies scholar Anita Harris would label a can-do girl. Again, very relateable, as I was at the time in Chamber Choir, a member of National Honor Society, French Club, Drama Club, and other nerdy, non-controversial extra-curriculars. But I was also sexually frustrated — at once eager to experiment but nervous about going too far and yet all-too-ready to lie to my friends about what I actually had done.
I think these aspects of her sound exaggerate the blunt shock of her lyrical content which, as mentioned earlier, was pretty graphic. At the time, this lumped her in with third wave’s “do-me” feminism, an eye-rollingly glib and essentializing term that suggests that females can be empowered simply by celebrating their sexuality (absenting, of course, how normative this concept could be in terms of gender roles and sexuality, and how the ones who tend to benefit from it are middle-class white women, who don’t have the cultural baggage of being branded excessive by being too young, working class, queer, or women of color).
Thinking about Phair as a “do-me” feminist also essentializes her lyrical content to being limited to just fucking, which is not all she was doing with Exile in Guyville. As hinted at in the title, she also wrote critically about patriarchy. There are entire songs about the fallacy of male machismo (“Soap Star Joe”), wishes to reverse the double standard between men and women (“Explain It To Me”), feeling invisible (“Canary”), getting bullied by men (“Help Me, Mary,” “Johnny Sunshine”), as well as anthems dedicated to not putting up with it anymore (“6’1″”). Coming out of the male-dominated Chicago underground music scene, she had a lot to rebel against.
In addition to open feminist critiques, Phair was often elliptical in her approach to fighting patriarchy. She referenced the work of male musicians (the title itself winks at both The Rolling Stones and Urge Overkill’s song “Goodbye to Guyville”), swiping hooks, lyrics, and album concepts to reframe her work, reclaiming much of rock’s cocksure attitude for her own purposes. Sometimes she would lie — the most famous example being “Fuck and Run,” where she claims to have done just that since she was twelve. Phair would later go on to admit that this was a fabrication, which made others cry foul.
However, these sorts of lies I think are told for the sake of one big truth: that rock music’s obsession with authenticity betrays its practitioners’ desire to self-mythologize, fabricating whole identities that don’t align with their actual gender, race, class, and sexuality; that, indeed, authenticity is itself a gigantic lie. That this lie is being purported by a girl strumming a guitar into a 4-track in her bedroom makes its execution all the more stunning.
Also, focusing so extensively on the shockingly dirty lyrics from the pretty blonde lady strumming her guitar eclipses an actual discussion of her guitar-playing, which is great and contributes extensively to her sound. Her tunings, phrasings, chord structures, and harmonies have a warped quality to them at odds with the immediacy and catchiness of her music compositions.
It’s unfortunate that this album gets a lot of emphasis placed on it in relation to the other two albums that she did with Matador (though whitechocolatespaceegg was also distributed through Capitol, who she later signed with, who held a considerable stake in the company between 1996 and 1999 before owners Chris Lombardi and confirmed nice guy Gerard Cosloy bought back the label). Both Whip-Smart and (most of) whitechocolatespaceegg, in my estimation, capture Phair’s wry lyrics, idiosyncratic tunings, musical references, and indelible ways with pop hooks.
And while I found her attempted pop star turn working with the Matrix in the 2000s to be unfortunate, primarily because it seemed to take the particularities of her voice and sound out of the product, I also think it’s important to remember that, to rephrase an ESG EP title, indie cred doesn’t pay the bills. Sneering at her later work and dismissively stating that “Liz Phair sold out” absences the fact that she’s a single mom who makes music for a living. While perhaps becoming a pop star is not the answer (and certainly didn’t help Phair much financially), deriding this career move out of hand eclipses the necessary discussions that need to be had around how unfairly the commercial music industry compensates its artists, how monopolistic they have become, how difficult it is for independent labels to stay in business, and what little regard the mainstream music industry has for older female artists.
That said, her debut album lives on. Just a couple of weekends ago at a friend’s birthday party, I sang this song (courtesy of Karaoke Underground), doing back-up with my friend Karin while our friend Erik killed the lead vocals. And, of course, with the 15th anniversary re-release, folks like Shayla Thiel-Stern have done considerable reflection on what this album means to them, how it has influenced contemporary music, and how it shaped their feminist beliefs. I hope that it continues to inspire generations of girls and boys to spend hours with it, whether playing it above a whisper or at full volume.
Live on, Liz Phair; image courtesy of NYMag.com
If you have anything to add to this series, please do. E-mail submissions to feministmusicgeek@gmail.com. Don’t worry about abiding by tired genre hierarchies. Jean Grae, Sleater-Kinney, and Kylie Minogue are equal in that regard. Remember that the personal is not only political but educational, so feel free to share any memories or recollections that you’d like in conjunction with the artist/record/concert/scene/album cover/music video that made you a feminist. Thanks!
Cover of Viva! La Woman, released in 1996 on Warner Bros.
Some super-smart feminist friends have been talking about records and musicians that made them feminists lately and it makes me wanna wax nostalgic too. I’m really excited to be talking about Viva! La Woman, one of many albums that made me a feminist but the first that left quite an indelible impression. I basically put this blog together so that I could, at some point, thank Miho Hatori and Yuka Honda for blowing my mind. Thanks, ladies.
Right before I turned 13, I saw the video for “Know Your Chicken” on 120 Minutes, which was the pinnacle of my pre-teen Sunday nights. This video, with the two amazingly cool ladies bolted me upright. I’d get to the clip’s deliberately cheap aesthetic style and its parodying of both the sitcom and the genre’s gendered relational dynamics later. In junior high, I just needed to find out who the ladies were.
Sunday, the day of ritual for many, was also one for me. At 7 p.m., Houston’s alternative station (then Rocket 107.5 the Buzz, now 94.5 the Buzz) would broadcast “Lunar Rotation,” where director David Sadoff would play new stuff and oldies that didn’t make into heavy rotation. At 10, the station would broadcast “Modern Rock Live,” KROQ’s syndicated call-in program. Finally, at midnight, the station would have an hour of “whatever” programming. Usually, some guest would play whatever they wanted. The one that most immediately comes to mind was Self’s Matt Mahaffey serving as guest deejay, playing album cuts from Portishead’s Dummy. It never mattered, because it was always white noise for 120 Minutes, which ran the coolest, newest videos that never aired on MTV during the day.
In terms of feminist reflections on my girlhood, Sunday was this fantastical time where I could hang out in my room (usually playing Nintendo, sometimes reading, sometimes making wall collages out of clippings from Seventeen) and wrap my head around some new music. This was a bit hard to do as my hometown is a bit removed from much of anything new.
But Fridays on MTV gave me another place to access this beguiling song, via their short run of Squirt TV, originally a New York-based public access show that my boyfriend, Jake Fogelnest, would record in his bedroom. Liz Phair also came onto Fogelnest during the show’s MTV run, but Liz will get her own post when I write about my 17th birthday. For now, let’s watch Cibo Matto perform live.
And then they were on House of Style, eating dessert. Then the video for “Sugar Water” came out, which left such an impression that I wrote an entire section of my thesis on it. A short time after that, they were getting a write-up in Rolling Stone, with their album’s genre-melding, cut-and-paste sound being favorably compared (however problematically) to fugu. I would later come to call my college radio show “Cheesecake or Fugu” in tribute. And there they were on my stepbrother’s Tibetan Freedom Concert CD, a bit later, when I was a freshman, yelling “shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!”
So, even though they were on a major label and being promoted on MTV and Rolling Stone, Cibo Matto seemed like they were from Japan based in New York transmitted from the moon. And yet, they’ve followed me everywhere since, making themselves familiar, like a home.
All this hype, but I didn’t get the album until Christmas sophomore year, when I was 15. I wanted the purchase of this album to be special. When I finally got it, I spent hours ignoring the paperback of Wuthering Heights I had to read for school (which also made me a feminist, in opposition) so I could study the album’s packaging. Mike Mills’s cover alone was empowering — the curvy, muscular, perhaps multi-ethnic superwoman standing proudly in her gold bikini and sandals. And the curvilinear sketches that accompanied the lyric sheet was elegant and beguiling. But for me, it was all about the inlay image underneath the disc.
Viva! La Woman inlay
While this image was shot in New York, it looked like another world to me alone in my bedroom in Alvin, Texas. I wanted to know everyone in this scene and be their friends. I wanted to know where Yuka and Miho got those bikes and dresses. I wanted to listen to all of the records people were pouring over. And I actually did pull my stepbrother’s skateboard out of the garage, busting my ass as I attempted to use it. But more than that, I wanted the confident cool that these two women possessed.
The older I get, the more comfortable I feel with myself, and I feel much of this is indebted to Cibo Matto, especially this first album, as to me its basically a declaration for the powers, pleasures, and peculiarities of femaleness. One need only look to the title.
The concept of the album is important. “Concept album” as a construct tends to make me shudder, thinking about bearded dudes noodling with guitars and piles of synthesizers and writing tiresome odes to alienation, but, indeed, Viva! La Woman is a concept album. About food. Eating food. Each track, with the exception of “Theme,” is named after food and all of the songs mention eating or being consumed as if they were food. More times than not, it’s about eating instead of being eaten.
And OMG, they did something totally dirty with their cover of “Candyman,” turning the original, which I always found oppressively, creepily cheerful, and turning into some kind of porn soundtrack/trip hop/bossa nova thing, complete with sampled moaning (*blush*).
On that tack, this album is super-sexy, in ways both obvious and difficult to process. Perhaps it suggests that Asian and Asian American women don’t reflect the limited, servile, infantalized depictions others have circulated at their expense. With “White Pepper Ice Cream,” a slow, rollicking bass line accompanies lines like “black and white, Bonnie and Clyde” suggesting that women and girls can occupy both within themselves at once. And with “Theme,” the album’s centerpiece, what begins as a short story about a chance encounter with a handsome stranger while vacationing in Milan becomes a blind-folded S&M session that collapses into muffled, breathy coos; the music reflects the narrative changes at every turn. I didn’t know what to do with this as a teenager, and am still trying to figure it out as an adult.
Thinking about the constant stylistic shifting that goes on in the album’s instrumentation, I guess the duo’s sample-happy approach brings us to another feminist awakening: everything is connected. Beck gets a lot of credit, via Odelay, for helping set to tone for popular music’s comfort with hybridity the 90s (of course borrowing from The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, bringing on The Dust Brothers as producers). I won’t dispute that. But I’d like to add this album (along with Pavement’s Wowee Zowee and Björk’s Post) into the discussion. If mention wants to be made of the group’s gender, ethnicity, and their relationship with hip hop, so much the better.
Cibo Matto’s use of quotation and musical association was crucial to defining the era, but also bespoke the duo’s attitudes toward femaleness. Because connectedness doesn’t just apply to how they built tracks, but also in how they wrote lyrics. Once again, everything is connected. In “Sugar Water,” black cats crossing one’s path is cosmically linked to a woman in the moon singing to the Earth. Extrapolating further, everything is connected and everything is informative. The personal is not only political, but educational.
And finally, I really enjoy the album’s weirdness. I say this not as a way to other the Japanese American women responsible for its creation or to announce my whiteness alongside it. Literally, the album is packed with memorable, weird, sometimes shouted non sequitors that serve as the songs’ hooks. For example, in “Beef Jerky,” the chorus is “Who cares? I don’t care? A horse’s ass is better than your’s.” In “Know Your Chicken” the bridge is “spare the rod and spoil the chick before you go and shit a brick.” And of course, “Birthday Cake” contains the much-quoted line “extra sugar, extra salt, extra oil and the MSG — shut up so we can eat, too bad no bon appétit!” I like to think moments like this suggest the possibilities to rupture, critique, and find humor in living life female.
And sometimes songs don’t end. A song like “Beef Jerky” concludes with the elliptical phrase “let’s eat carrots together until . . .” Indeed, life doesn’t end. It simply builds on itself, layer by layer, line by line, sample by sample. I can’t wait to discover what I find in this record when I’m 35.
If Michelle Obama’s arms deserve the names “thunder” and “lightening,” than Janet Weiss’ should be called “nuclear” and “atomic.” The drummer for Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Quasi, and the now defunct all-woman power trio Sleater-Kinney, has long been admired as one of the top female percussionists in the rock world for the sheer power and complexity of her beats, and nowhere is that clearer than during her live performances.
My first encounter with Janet Weiss appropriately coincided with my inaugural indie rock show in Portland, Oregon. At this point, I’d never heard a single Quasi track, nor had I learned much about Sleater-Kinney. At the age of fourteen, my younger brother’s tastes belied his years and rural upbringing, and I at sixteen benefitted from his interests. Still too young for our protective parents to release us into the wilds of downtown Portland, my dad and another relative accompanied us to the legendary Crystal Ballroom for a show headlined by Quasi. Overzealously, we arrived at the time shown on our tickets and planted ourselves on the floor next to the stage. We sat through noisy opening acts before Janet finally emerged with Sam Coomes, Quasi’s other half and Janet’s former husband.
Janet Weiss doing double-duty with drums and vocals
While part of the power of this Quasi show derived from its status as a “first” experience, Janet’s role as the band’s drummer made this concert particularly significant for me as a budding feminist. Even ten years later, female drummers are an exception rather than a rule in mainstream bands, and it is even rarer for female drummers to play in a heterogeneously sexed band. Sure, there’s Meg White, Karen Carpenter, Sheila E., and Moe Tucker, but these drummers deploy a deliberately feminine and/or simplistic style, in effect reinforcing assumptions about women and drumming. Granted, it would be masculinist to say that the styles and skills of these women made them any less legitimate as artists, but on a gut-level, they fail to challenge the stereotypes aligning certain sexes with particular instruments.
As a girl, these alignments between sex and gender and rock performance impacted my options for self-expression; I remember asking my mother if I could play drums in the sixth-grade band, and she responded that it wouldn’t be “lady-like.” I even remember her describing women drummers as “butch,” in effect confirming a fear that drumming might turn me into an aggressive lesbian (like that would be a bad thing anyway). To be fair, my mother later back-peddled on her stance, saying that she really discouraged me from drumming out of fear of the noise it would bring into our home, but regardless, my mother’s statement still reinforced what I already felt and knew from experience—rock bands were boys’ clubs that only the bravest women could infiltrate. My feelings of exclusion certainly weren’t unique, since several of my female friends confessed to having similar feelings, and Carol Jennings’ research on girls’ identity formation and rock bands finds similar trends of sexism in local music scenes. (If interested, please check out “Girls Make Music: Polyphony and Identity in Teenage Rock Bands” in Growing Up Girls: Popular Culture and the Construction of Identity. Eds. Sharon R. Mazzarella and Norma Odom Pecora. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 175-192.) In short, there are barriers to participation in rock performance for girls that do not exist for boys.
For these reasons, I gravitated toward the mainstream female singer-songwriters so en vogue in the mid to late-nineties. I accumulated a massive collection of Tori Amos memorabilia, attended not one but two Lilith Fairs, and watched VH1’s 100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll with rapt attention. Still, none of this shattered my perceptions the way seeing Janet live did.
I emphasize the “live” element of the experience because Quasi’s composition resulted in a unique spatial arrangement on stage; with only two instrumentalists, Janet’s kit occupied half the stage, allowing fans closer proximity to the drummer than usual. (Note: Quasi added a third member, bassist Joanna Bolme, to the line-up in 2006.) And while Janet herself puts on a stoic game face most of the time, her drumming itself is dynamic, athletic, and unrelenting. I could throw more adjectives out there, but I will just let the drumming speak for itself.
Seeing Janet play did not change my life over night—I never joined a band, and I never bought a drum kit—but as the years passed, I gravitated toward bands like Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, and Le Tigre. These bands not only had roots in the Northwest but also placed women musicians in the forefront, addressed queer issues, and kicked ass musically. In other words, they raised my consciousness and helped me grow as a feminist.
Caption: Janet Weiss (center) with Sleater-Kinney bandmates Corrin Tucker (left) and Carrie Brownstein (right).
These days, I’m seeing more incredible women drummers, both locally and nationally. My 17-year-old cousin took up the instrument, and one of my brother’s bands featured a friend of ours beating the skins named Keely. Hannah Blilie of the Gossip has also knocked me on my ass during several live performances.
Best of all, organizations like Rock n’ Roll Camp for Girls are encouraging girls to drum, and social-networking websites like Drummergirl create a sense of community for female percussionists who might otherwise feel isolated in their respective music scenes. While there remains a disparity between the sexes with respect to drumming, these resources (limited as they may be) are a move in the right direction toward correcting it.
But for many women and girls, just seeing a female confidently and skillfully hit the drums is the first step toward breaking through a mind-set in which men are inevitably physical and aggressive as performers, while women must be soulful and subdued. For me, Janet was one of those icons that shifted my paradigms, and for that, I will forever thank her.
Truth be told, my musical tastes and my penchant for feminism both developed early on, and didn’t have much to do with one another. I was lucky enough to grow up in an environment that supported women’s rights. I was taught that I lived in a world where sexism existed, but that ladies could still do anything they wanted. As time went on, I realized that this was called “feminism” and that it was pretty cool.
I believe the first record I listened to that coincided with my realization that feminism was a real thing was Ani DiFranco’s Not a Pretty Girl. I was ten when the record came out, but it wasn’t until my thirteenth birthday, when my older sister put “32 Flavors” on a mix entitled “Songs to Get You Through Being a Teenager,” that I heard any songs from it. I listened to this track over and over and over (and over) again. When I would crave more Ani, I would sneak into her room and steal her CD. It was a window into the outside where someone besides my relatives were talking about what it was like to be a lady in that day and age.
It wasn’t until college that I had my second feminist musical awakening when I heard “Deceptacon” off of Le Tigre’s self-titled album. I had recently joined a very rad feminist organization with very rad feminist ladies, many of whom were—dare I state the obvious?—music geeks. Fun, dancey, in-yr-face feminism. I danced to that song countless times, either by myself or in (small or large) groups of people. I think I’m going to go dance to it right now, actually.
The cover of Le Tigre's self-titled debut, released on Mr. Lady in 1999
But you know what records also affirmed my belief in feminism? All those nu metal and rap/rapcore bands from the late ’90s/early ’00s that were always on TRL. It made me a very angry fourteen year old. Actually, it makes me a very angry twenty-four year old. I think I need to listen to “Deceptacon” again.
Liz did not own Korn's "Follow the Leader" released on Epic in 1998
Honorable mention would go to Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing (though her songs were more personal than political), Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (though I was already identifying as a feminist when I first heard this album), the entire discography of Bikini Kill (though that was later in my life, too, because I considered that more my sister’s band, where Le Tigre was mine), and anything Prince did from 1984 to 1987 (because it connected with one aspect of feminism—sex is a good thing and it’s ok for women to desire and be desired).
The moral of the story: ladies rock, and listening to ladies rocking out is a good way to remind yourself of this fact.
It’s Mother’s Day weekend and to celebrate, I thought today I’d write up a tribute to some awesome women who balance and blend the dual identities of musician and mother in their own ways.
First up, Erykah Badu and Jill Scott.
Erykah Badu and Jill Scott, sharing the spotlight
So much to love about these two. They’re smart, talented, politically conscious, unconventionally beautiful, and have earned plenty of mainstream recognition but choose to stay on the fringe of popular culture.
Also, they’re autonomous women who have opted out of a conventional family unit. Both are unmarried. Badu had son Seven and daughters Puma and Mars from her relationships with André 3000 of OutKast, The D.O.C., and Jay Electronica, respectively. Scott is divorced and welcomed the birth of her first child, Jett, with her boyfriend, Lil John Roberts, last year at the age of 36.
And finally, I love that they’re friends, came up from the Philly “neo-soul” circuit together, and often perform together (as evidenced from the photo above; see also their stirring performance of “You Got Me” on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party). I like to imagine that they hang out together a lot, helping each other write, sing, or think through the struggles and joys of daily life.
Next up, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.
The Gordon-Moores, rocking out on "The Gilmore Girls"
After being married to bandmate Thurston Moore for about ten years, Gordon (who kept her name, thank you) gave birth to Coco Hayley Gordon Moore in 1994, thus bringing presumably one of the coolest girls into the world as a result. I like to imagine that Coco was schooling her classmates about Merzbow by the sixth grade. Also, a friend of mine’s sister used to babysit Coco, and says that she is a really nice, well-adjusted kid. Yay!
I like that Kim had Coco — an only child — on her own time and later in life. It probably reminds me of my mom, who had me (and only me) at 36. Plus, Gordon and Moore performed a song with Coco on The Gilmore Girls. How cool is that?
Speaking of cool moms, what about M.I.A., who welcomed her first son Ikhyd into the world with fiancé Benjamin Brewer earlier this year?
M.I.A. at the Grammys, days before giving birth; image courtesy of fashion.mirror.co.uk
Unfortunately, I can’t find a hi-res version of the Grammy performance of T.I.’s “Swagga Like Us”, but I really love it. I love that M.I.A., whose song “Paper Planes” is sampled and provides the song title, opens the performance. I love that she interacts with the other rappers, who seem to be treating her as an equal. I love that the men she shares the stage with, all of whom are African American and thus stigmatized by the racist, sexist stereotype of the wayward, absentee black father, seem to be excited and happy for her. I love that she’s ready-to-burst pregnant in public and is wearing a tight, short, see-through black and white dress, thus confronting and subverting the conception of the sexless matriarch (in fact, she got a lot of flak for the dress; some people dubbed it “slutty” and “trashy”). I also love that she paired the ensemble with sneakers, because pregnant ladies gotta be comfortable. And most of all, I love that we haven’t seen much of baby Ikhyd since he came into the world, suggesting that the family wants their son to grow up a person and not a tabloid ficture.
Another low-key mom is Yoshimi Yokota, legendary drummer of Boredoms and singer/guitarist of OOIOO.
Yoshimi and OOIOO, debating whether or not to spare the rod
Like Gordon, she’s got one daughter, and seems to be pleased with that. But like M.I.A., she’s not forthcoming about her personal life, particularly the family she’s creating for herself. And finally, I love that unlike what we may expect from mom musicians, Yoshimi doesn’t think her entrance into motherhood has changed her music.
And finally, the mother of all cool musician moms, Björk.
Quality time with Björk and son Sindri; image captured from art-gallery.com
So, Björk is interesting for many reasons. Like Badu, she had two children with two different partners (son Sindri with former Sugarcubes bandmate Þór Eldon; daughter Ísadóra with artist Matthew Barney). There’s also an unsual age difference between her children. Sindri was born in 1986, when Björk was 21. Ísadóra was born sixteen years later in 2002. And, despite her diminuitive figure and elfin looks, Björk is fiercely protective of her children and their privacy (anyone remember when Björk went off and beat up a journalist who waved a microphone in Sindri’s face at the airport?). Don’t fuck with mom.
But these moms are just a few examples. Who are your favorite musician moms?
In an effort to reflect on how music came to inform political beliefs, I asked some people if they’d be willing to share the records that made them feminists. The first entry comes from my friend Brea.
i’ve been thinking a lot about this. at first i thought of how important my first mix tape with riot grrrl bands and spoken word was. i had never heard anything like Heavens to Betsy screaming, “Stay Away!” or the spoken word artists whose names i’ll never know.
The Hot Rock, released in 1999 by Kill Rock Stars
then i thought of when The Hot Rock by Sleater-Kinney was on constant repeat in my car my senior year of high school. i’m not sure how i would have survived without “Banned from the End of the World.” but my feminist awakenings happened earlier. i really had to dig in my head to think about what album it was that i decided that i loved female vocalists.
it took a while to figure that out for me – my love for female vocalists that turned into a radio show i did for several years in college. i loved them because i could sing along in ways that i couldn’t sing along with all the dudes. trying to hit the notes Mike Ness hits is just a joke.
it was like first i discovered punk and i was like, “fuck yeah.” and then i discovered that i, too, could play an instrument and put out a zine and the world got better and became clearer. but there was always something missing between Minor Threat and The Get Up Kids. growing up in a small town, i grasped at what i could and it was much easier to find bands like NOFX than Bratmobile in the local Hastings or even in mailorder catalogues.
and then, there was Sarge. i have no idea how i found this band. i think my friend Marisa from Dallas bought their cd somewhere. and it was love at first listen. Sarge played kick-ass indie rock. Period. and i was really done with a lot of punk at that moment, probably when i was about 16, and really considered myself very “indie.”
The Glass Intact, released in 1998 on Mud Records
but the best part about Sarge was that that girl, Elizabeth Elmore, could sing and she sang like a girl. she sang like me. i don’t know why that was important but it felt like i was playing in bands, loving music, but not really connecting to a lot of the music i listened to outside the whole punk rebellion part. Sarge sang about shitty boys that did you wrong, being called a slut, and having crushes on girls. they felt rebellious and cool and most of all, Elizabeth’s voice sounded like mine. i could hit those notes. i could sing along at the top of my lungs.
i think that’s where my love of music really started – with bands that i could relate to, sang about stuff i knew about, and most importantly, sang like me. it made me realize that i could do so much more than try to be a part of the local boys’ punk scene. i could create my own scene, write songs about things i wanted to sing about, and most importantly, sing like a fucking girl and love it.
.jpg "Cover for Follow the Leader")
